The psychology of sleep

We have finished our long inquiry, and it has brought us to thoughts and perhaps to conclusions for which we did not look. Such is the leading of the Spirit, into ways that we k...

All unrest and uneasiness, all impatience and disharmony are due to some misunderstanding of life and its unity, of its unchanging and unchangeable laws. Froebel’s recognition o...

Wakefulness always has some cause, and, if we truly wish to be cured of it, it will be well to seek the cause rather than to grumble at the wakefulness itself. It is not enough...

Often we are anxious and sleepless only because we are afraid of what is not in itself frightful. Like the little child in the picture who mounts the dark stairs in deadly terro...

“But,” you say, “I am not full of uncharitableness towards my fellows and I am willing they should live their own lives; I am greatly worried about my own affairs and all my car...

And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?

KOHLSCHUTTER: Messungen der Festigkeit des Schlafes, _Zeitschrift für rationelle Medicin_, 1863; Mechanik des Schlafes, _Zeitsch. f. r. M._, 1869. (His results are very similar...

What would we give to our beloved? The hero’s heart to be unmoved,— The poet’s star-tuned harp to sweep; The patriot’s voice to teach and rouse,— The monarch’s crown to light th...

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” as Shakespeare says, and yet no one even to this day knows what that “stuff” may be. We separate man’s life into intellect, feeling, w...

There are deep-lying causes of anxiety, unrest, and sleeplessness that more or less affect us all: yet, eighteen hundred years ago, One cried, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” N...

Southey, in “The Doctor,” thus summarizes some of the chief devices to attain sleep by monotony: “I listened to the river and to the ticking of my watch; I thought of all sleepy...

We must not forget that it is easy to miss the good results of any natural function, and, through misuse, get only poor results. As in the matter of eating, we should get only g...

But sometimes the hardest torture is the thought that the pain is unnecessary or useless. I went once to visit a friend, whom I found suffering from the worst abscesses on the b...

Sometimes we lie awake at night to regret some action of our own because the result has not been what we desired or expected. “John the Unafraid” says that “if your misfortune i...

If we aim at worldly success, thinking that thereby we shall be able to do more for mankind and be more useful, we may defeat our own purpose by worry and anxiety. The present m...

Come Sleep, O Sleep! the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe: The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, Th’ indifferent judge between the high...

Man craves sleep. If we know of a friend who is suffering in body or mind we wish him sleep; mothers soothe their pain-racked or terrified children to sleep with every gentle ar...

A frequent cause of suffering among men and women is their idea that they are necessary to the running of things. Usually they find themselves mistaken. The head of a firm was o...

“The Witchery of Sleep” records for us some interesting mechanical devices for inducing sleep, more common in Europe than in this country. Their inventors hope to perfect them s...

Through generations, perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years, custom has ordained grief for the dead, we have come to feel that it is a proof of affection or of sensitiveness...

When we learn to confine our attention to “the things that are quite enough for any man to attempt,” we shall find that there is little real ground for worry or fretting in our...

Peace, peace, thou over-anxious, foolish heart; Rest, ever-seeking soul; calm, mad desires; Quiet, wild dreams—this is the time of sleep, Hold her more close than life itself. F...

Many persons lose sleep because of their love for others, as the lover who sighs and tosses, dreaming, asleep or awake, of the beloved. The mother loses sleep thinking of the ch...

One of the main purposes of sleep is to secure rest to men. But intelligence will find rest in many other ways independent of sleep or of promoting sleep. We are just beginning,...

The two remaining scientific theories of sleep are the psychological and the biological. The best modern exponent of the psychological theory is Marie de Manacéïne, who defines...

We call this “God,” “the Spirit,” the “Nature of Things,” or by some other name, but we find that, in crystal, vegetable, or animal, it always works: and we see that it tends fo...

In order to get the facts about SLEEP we sent a question sheet to a large number of persons selected by classes. We began with a thousand professors in order to get suggestions...

Man is the highest expression yet discovered of the “living organism,” and sleep has always taken more of his time than any other function. Marie de Manacéïne of St. Petersburg,...

Health, after all, is merely that condition where all parts of the human organism work together without friction. We think of health as something that is bestowed upon us from w...

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of” in anybody’s philosophy or understanding of living; it is not strange that the great mass have not dreamed of eati...

Physiological, or that which has to do with some bodily conditions only, and which made men think that sleep was dependent upon the circulation of the blood or upon decreased co...

If all that we have learned were that some persons “naturally” work harder than others to achieve anything, we might say that this was unavoidable; and there would be a degree o...

The unsatisfied longing for rest in all mankind will be attributed to different causes according to the way we look at life. The physical or animal man desires rest because of t...

Primitive man feared thunder, and, being unable to explain it, made a god of it, offered sacrifices to it in the hope of averting the harm it might do. Fear has perverted many r...

If there is one thing more than another for which Americans are noted, it is “nervous energy.” To this we attribute our notable achievements in science, industry, and literature...

We know so little about sleep, positively, that anyone may assume one thing or another about it, so long as what he assumes accords with what we do know positively.

One of the most common signs of something at fault either with the body or the mind is headache. Now headache, like wakefulness or nervousness, so often associated with headache...

There is another class of investigators who aim to explain what might be called the nervous mechanism of sleep rather than its causes. These are the histologists, and theirs is...

The fact that we confound rest and sleep makes us regard wakefulness as an evil. We go to bed to sleep, and, if sleep does not come at once, we begin to fret and to toss and we...

Man seeks happiness through outer things, hoping to find it in wealth, excitement, travel, self-gratification, and in countless other ways that the age-long experience of men ha...

“Women, like children, require more sleep normally than men, but ‘Macfarlane states that they can better bear the loss of sleep, and most physicians will agree with him.’” H. CA...

But the harmony of the home does not depend upon the parents alone. If it did, it would forever disprove the statement that it is only by a working together of all parts of any...

We should not think that, because we are ill, it is natural that we should not sleep. The invalid needs more and better sleep than the robust person—and the invalid can have it.

If life be a succession of ideas, says Dr. Binns, then sleep is the interval; “consequently, we may say that sleep is the art of escaping reflection.” If one could follow the Ch...

Only a generation ago it was the custom for men and women to begin to grow old at about forty-five. A person of fifty was always called “old,” and a man was expected to be decre...

Someone may say that such things as stimulation of the mind are simple causes of wakefulness, and so easily overcome that it is hardly necessary to consider them; yet, simple as...

Lord of the Darkness, Master of the Sun, Strip me of all my strenuous life has won, But let Sleep’s sweet oblivion o’er me sweep, Closing Night’s leering eyes—oh, give me sleep!

Mr. Edward Binns of London, as early as 1842, published a book called “The Anatomy of Sleep”—with the subtitle, “The Art of Procuring Sound and Refreshing Slumber at Will.” The...

It is not so necessary now as when Dr. Hall wrote to urge the importance of large, airy sleeping-rooms. But it is amazing to find how many, even among the so-called “better clas...

But what is the law of our being? It is harmony, peace, rest. We have but to look at the workings of our own marvelous physical bodies to perceive that law. The more we study th...

We do not have to depend upon mere irresponsible guesses for the new faith in the possibility of longer life for man. Scientists have been experimenting along this line for some...

It is not our work that wears us, but the way we take it. So long as we think of rest as meaning only inactivity, just so long will the activities of life exhaust us. Goethe said:

But none of these things lessens the benefits of real sleep, nor are they intended to show that sleep is unnecessary, for although it may be true, as Dr. Charles Brodie Patterso...

Man has not gone so far beyond the animal stage of development as to have cast aside all the weights that hinder him in his further progress. He has considered three substantial...

Sancho Panza says: “Now, blessings light on him who first invented sleep! Sleep which covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; and is meat for the hungry, drink fo...

Good health and good sleep are so interdependent that it is as difficult to separate them into cause and effect as to determine “which came first, the hen or the egg?” If it be...

To refute the opinion of the philosophers concerning the causes of sleep and waking, I think superfluous; because, with Aristotle’s views surviving now many centuries, no author...